Switchpro Widget: A Passel of Pretty Little Toggles

A Mount Storage toggle is super useful for locating on a home screen if you want to prepare or unmount your SD card safely. I usually can't be bothered to do this properly. In native Android, you need to open screens to get to the card-mount options. This SwitchPro feature may now save me from possible future corrupted data.

By Patrick Nelson
08/31/12 5:00 AM PT

SwitchPro Widget, an app from Droid Shogun, is available for US$0.99 at Google Play.

If you're a regular reader of this column, you may remember that I recently
took a look
at Cloud TV's HD Widgets, an app for creating your own elegant, translucent widgets to
replace ugly stock widgets that appear to permeate today's Android phones -- Motorola,
I'm referring to you mainly.

I've had a few months of sybaritic graphic enjoyment from HD Widgets' glassy, elegant
switches, and in particular its HTC Sense-like clock installed on my Motorola Photon.

However, I recently stumbled across SwitchPro.

SwitchPro allows you to create similar looking pretty, translucent switches and widgets;
however, its feature set is slightly different -- it includes some unique toggles.

Data Switch, Rebooting

First, a data connection switch actually toggles the 3G radio off and on, instead of, as is
the case with HD Widgets, simply opening the Android-native mobile network settings
screen where you then have to check or uncheck 3G or data options.

Second, rooted users -- and I've
written about rooting before -- are presented with a reboot
switch in SwitchPro. Press the simple switch and the device reboots.

Power users can use this switch to refresh the device, or boot into recovery or bootloader.

I'm using it a lot. I find it much quicker to just press the reboot switch rather than peer at
the phone, locate the hardware power button, allow the device to power down, verify it
has powered down, and then locate the power switch again and power up.

I'm using the reboot switch in lieu of a task killer now too. Why not? Perform one
switch press, just like Advanced Task Killer, and I kill everything. No question whether I
caught every running task.

Non-LED Flashlight

Another unique toggle is a flashlight switch, which in my case didn't utilize the camera
flash LED as I expected, it just created a white screen -- good enough if you ever find the
LED-as-flashlight troublesome.

I find Android Play Store app Picolyl's LED Light shuts down the older Motorola Photon
after a few minutes -- it's not, in fact, supported on that phone, according to Picolyl.

Other Notable Toggles

Other, neat toggles include an Unlock Pattern control, and a Mount Storage toggle --
super useful for locating on a home screen if you want to prepare or unmount your SD
card safely.

I usually can't be bothered to do this properly. In native Android, you need to open
screens to get to the card-mount options. This SwitchPro feature may now save me from
possible future corrupted data.

Look and Feel

Icon colors and switch background colors can be infinitely adjusted within the 216
hexadecimal color palette range -- that's using the color code that comprises a series of
six letters and numbers: For example, hex code #FFFFFF representing white.

Switch customizing did not allow for multiple adjustments to opacity, but I didn't find
this a problem. SwitchPro's designer had chosen a sound, readable opacity level for the
translucent option that will work fine on all densities of wallpaper.

Indicator -- that's the strip within the switch that tells you if the switch is on or off --
colors can be customized, as can the divider.

In Conclusion

Overall, I've enjoyed creating and, more importantly, looking at SwitchPro toggles. While
it doesn't have the entire HTC Sense look and feel -- as HD Widgets does, with its Sense
clocks and weather icons -- SwitchPro looks good, is visually stimulating, and has some
uniquely functional toggles.

The reboot toggle alone makes it a keeper.

Patrick Nelson has been a professional writer since 1992. He was editor and publisher of the music industry trade publication Producer Report and has written for a number of technology blogs. Nelson studied design at Hornsey Art School and wrote the cult-classic novel Sprawlism. His introduction to technology was as a nomadic talent scout in the eighties, where regular scrabbling around under hotel room beds was necessary to connect modems with alligator clips to hotel telephone wiring to get a fax out. He tasted down and dirty technology, and never looked back.